Pseudeo Newb and the Quick new thing I learned about Deathrite Shaman

Quick new thing I learned about Deathrite Shaman

Plus Pack Rat Tokens


Arrgh so much stuff - so far behind.

This last weekend was Thankgsiving. I've been playing a lot because I'm fully integrated into our college's gaming club. I've been playing a 20$ pack rats deck that is more fun than many, may things and then I realized I needed to make a Pack Rat's token that actually had the rules on it so that I didn't have to remember an extra thing on the board unnecessarily.

Here's my token - feel free to share internet. I'm playing Pack Rats because I love adorable rodents, I'm just happy that WotC made me a card so that I can play ALL the rats in standard at one time and have a usable deck.

*Newb Note - because Pack Rat Tokens are full copies of Pack Rat they also have all of the same card text abilities of the original card - I made these tokens to make sure that I didn't forget that.

Sometimes it's strategic to use a pack rat token instead of an actual Pack Rat card when you are choosing to attack or whatever maybe you have something that buffs up tokens or something else that needs a non-token creature and the original card isn't hanging around to read the text off it. My final copy is an .AI file that has the word token on it.

I need to do this more often for two reasons - 1 is that it means my tokens do exactly what I need them to during the game and 2 I get to make my own art and use it in game.

Ok so here's the thing I learned about Deathrite Shaman. 

I've put together a Green and Black deck that is different than a tournament deck that runs three colors. I wanted to experiment with a few ideas and I play decks to learn specific cards or strategies rather than some other competitive goals. This one is for using ramp, learning how to play Deathrite Shaman and seeing if I can get past overly focusing on my early game by playing a deck that really doesn't have an early aggro( aggressive attacking) strategy.

Rules text Mana Cost:

Converted Mana Cost:

1

Types:

Creature — Elf Shaman

Card Text:

: Exile target land card from a graveyard. Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.

, : Exile target instant or sorcery card from a graveyard. Each opponent loses 2 life.

, : Exile target creature card from a graveyard. You gain 2 life.

So the mana symbol is hybrid mana - which means you can cast it using either of the colors in the little circle. 

The abilities in the ability text box are all mana activated tap abilities even though the first ability mana cost = 0

Because they require the card to tap and the card is a creature card the abilities are subject to summoning sickness = you can't use it unless you controlled it from the beginning of the turn OR you have a special effect on your board that gives it haste, which will let you use a creature card right away on the same turn it's cast or in your control. 

So here's what I know from journaling - my particular weak points with this card are going to be 

• losing track of one of the abilities as an option because there are three instead of two, I almost always miss/forget one of them

• remembering that because it's a mana activated ability I can use it at instant speed(any turn, any legal turn phase) instead of sorcery speed ( only your own main phase)

• making sure I remember that it's ANY graveyard not just mine that I can target to feed the card exile requirements

I was correct, playing this card in my new deck today I made all those mistakes even though I was aware I would make them in advance but here is the cool new thing I learned:

If my opponent is also playing a Deathrite Shaman ( which can happen more often than you think) and he uses his to target something like a swamp in my graveyard to make himself some blue mana, if I have an untapped Deathrite Shaman then I can tap it to target the same card and create the mana of my choice for myself

I can do this even if I don't use the mana.

This works because my response at instant speed resolves on the stack ( the timing element they use to sort card effects) before the opponents' Deathrite does so in effect  I use up and exile the targeted card in the graveyard before the first Deathrite gets to.

That Deathrite picked something that is no longer a legal target and can't pick a new one so it stays tapped but has no effect.

What does that sound like in play?

Opp - I target your swamp in your graveyard and tap Deathrite Shaman to make one blue mana
Me - In response I tap my Deathrite Shaman to target that same swamp and make a green mana that i can't use. If I can't have that swamp nobody can and you should picture my Deathrite Shaman threatening to pack up his toys and go home.

What really Happened:

Opp - I target your swamp in your graveyard and tap Deathrite Shaman to make one blue mana
Me- OK

Shenanigans with the one blue mana ensue

Opp- Pass turn
Me ( as I start to untap lands for my untap phase)
Opp - you know you can use your Deathrite Shaman to tap the same land right?
Me - Urgh?

The Opponent who is Nick-that-is-not-Mike then shows me how to do that now that his turn is over, but before the game is over. We are playing casually in the cafeteria and he has to remember that although I play much better than many of our current club members I am still really a newb. He's way better at intricacies of the stack than I am and I'm not good enough to necessarily just "see" things that way yet.

About two turns later he tries it again ( knowing that my distractability is high it's a fair tactic) and I do remember and take the proper course of action complete with reference to the pouting.

But even using it that way I will later lose the game because I forget that the first tap effect will let me generate mana that I need.

But that means that I was right to put this deck together. I learned a bunch of other things that made it clear I've had some skill loss on remembering triggers. So I played it with a few more opponents but now I need to put it away for a day or add some Rancors.

It's here in the journal so I don't forget that I learned it. 

Pseudo Newb and the First Meaningless FNM

The basic stats for my first FNM with a deck that I really worked on myself was I played 11 matches, and won five of them, however I played four rounds and won 1 of them. So my win rate per match is 48% and per round is 25% 2-0. 2-1, 2-1, 2-1

Ok – so the benefits of sleep really do make a difference at least to my level of sportsmanship and things that are weird to me before continue to maybe make me uncomfortable later.

FNM really doesn’t matter for anything real right now. The 1x multiplier that all the pro’s are so happy about also means that the only people who do care about standings at FNM are either people like me who are competing against their own records or people who are competing for “first” or “better” picks.

There’s a point in OP where I get confused because people can agree to draw or immediately concede to help out someone else with standing. Team Channel Fireball (which looks like an OP Pro team but is really just a group of pros trying to work together) has publicly taken draws or conceded matches in tournament to help teammates top 8. There’s also apparently some legitimate forms of dropping in order to help other people with standing. If the FNM record doesn’t really matter to OP then the next question becomes is it also OK to do this or concede a game in order to help someone where being able to pick a better booster pack is THE most important thing to them?

And is it fair to say "no" after pretty much everyone else in OP has told me that FNM doesn’t mean a damn thing unless I’m trying to get to Pro Tour? ( And by “everyone” this I actually mean being asked directly by Aaron Forsythe why I would even care about the multiplier if I wasn’t good enough to place in a PTQ ). My fellow newbs are more traditionally tournament spikey and they don’t necessarily care about standings or points or ratings as much as they care about winning in the “now”. They might care later if they get good enough to place regularly at FNM but we pretty much established that in my crowd, at my store, I’m probably the only one using PWP as competitive markers for progress competing against my own record.

But I can also tell you that the multiplier went down and all of a sudden everything else at the FNM was rouge decks and competing for “stuff” – lots more trading between rounds too.

Before the Rounds

I went to play my version of a snapless Delver Illusions Deck because I honestly had no place else to playtest it seriously. I’m still pretty uninterested in Magic Online until I can play it on my IPad. I want real cards, or real mobility, I’m uninterested in being tied to a computer to practice Magic.

I met up with David Who Will Be Returning College Soon. Which will make me sad because he’s like the absolute mythical good welcoming high level player ( he has placed 1^st at every single event I’ve attended that he’s been at) but he never brags, is always friendly and helpful and you never even notice that he’s placed first because as soon as he gets his store credit or pack he just turns around and gives complete focus to whoever he was talking to about whatever he was talking about. He makes taking big leaps forward in magic seem safe (like drafting blue). I wish there were ten more like him for every store.

In any case we spent a little time going over my deck on the Weds draft. I made some changes based on his advice and then put together my very first sideboard of my own.

Preparation –

I drafted blue on Weds before specifically to get playtime with more blue cards and I’d started working on the deck with the Steampunk Marchioness the weekend before. She loaned me the phantasmal images I needed to run 4 and a seachrome coast so I could see if it made a big difference.

This is the list I ran:

Main deck (60 cards)

4 Delver of Secrets

4 Phantasmal Bear

4 Lord of the Unreal

1 Merfolk Looter

4 Phantasmal Image

2 AEther Adept

1 Geist of Saint Traft

4 Gitaxian Probe

3 Ponder

1 Vapor Snag

4 Mana Leak

2 Think Twice

2 Dissipate

1 Ghost Quarter

5 Glacial Fortress

12 Island

3 Moorland Haunt

1 Seachrome Coast

2 Shimmering Grotto

Sideboard (15 cards)

2 Nihil Spellbomb

2 Frost Breath

1 Merfolk Looter

1 Adaptive Automaton

1 Geist-Honored Monk

2 Flashfreeze

3 Master Thief

3 Oblivion Ring

The Nihil Spellbombs were for the two control decks that raid their graveyard that I had played against several times, the Frost Breath I had intended to use like Feelings of Dread and that I knew would be safe to cast even if I pulled no glacial fortresses, Flashfreezes were for the various Wolfrun ramps and Stompy humans. The Looter, Automaton and Monk were there incase I was running creature light or there were problems with either getting to my cards or having strong enough win conditions. Master Thief and Oblivion Rings were there as anti-infect deck and anti-artifact conditions since our FNM Johnnies really love their artifacts.

Comfort Level –

I would say exactly at “comfortable” I wasn’t playing with any strange cards and using the Delvers with the higher level players I was playing against on Wednesday night meant I had confidence in how to use the cards. Ironically because of all of the trouble I had getting real answers or understanding Illusions and Snapcasters it also meant that in the deck I was actually playing I wasn’t going to get sideswiped by not understanding basic card interactions which let me really appreciate some of the nuances of the deck. Between getting enough sleep and having realized this deck was an aggro deck it was possibly the first time I felt like I wasn’t swimming in water that had undertow as well as being over my head.

Results

- Yeah, I posted them at the top – there’s a reason for this. One of the 2-1 matches asked me to report at 2-0 no matter who won the tiebreaker – that would move said winner-take-all further up the chain to select cards if they placed first. If FNM is “casual and friendly” the way Helene Beurgerot and Aaron Forsythe and Melissa Del Toro and Patrick Chapin have all basically told me, well then why the hell should I care about in effect one of us conceding a match, to in effect give a position advantage to a teammate? Doing so moves my personal win percentage from 48% of matches played to 40%, but it wouldn’t change my 25% round win rate. But the guy who it really matters to gets to choose a booster back and FNM card two slots sooner. What does FNM mean now anyway? What constitutes your Magic Team if there are no teams in OP but you’re encouraged to build one?

We had no ranked judge present. I’m not sure I would have asked one over anyway because I had no desire to get someone who I would want on my magic team in potential trouble if it were different from the pros. I know I wouldn’t have even been asked when the multipliers were 3x because the stakes were different than stuff and saying you were working for a personal ratings goal meant competing priority.

I know it makes me uncomfortable enough not to ever agree to it in the future.

Round 1 – A player who came over from playing competitive YughiO who had the white humans deck I have been struggling over buying the cards for.

He explained how cheap the “good” cards in Magic are compared to Yughi O cards – ( 30 vs 180!). I took the game 2-0 mostly because the Delvers came up and flipped really early and Moorland Haunts ( which he was playing too) came out midgame. I made sure to point out interactions he might have missed in his own deck and loaned him my angel token when his Geist of St Traft came out. Mana Leaks and various control cards helped me here. He had some very effective removal on my creatures until the Lords came out.

Proving that no matter how much you playtest you can still miss a point on your card – while playing him we both used our Moorlands without exiling something from our graveyards and it wasn’t until I was corrected in Round 2 that I caught it. Since we were both playing small creatures and killing them we both had the creatures in the graveyard to exile and neither of us was playing cards that returned creatures from the graveyard.– Once again FNM is all casual now right? and there was no ranked judge. But I went over to tell him ASAP so that he didn’t duplicate the error in further matches – I’M not going to be the one who realizes a mistake and lets the person I played against just keep thinking that’s the way it is. We’re all newbs together.

2-0

Round 2 - A player who I’ve played before playing an infect /artifact deck. I hate infect. In both cases where he won it was specifically because I didn’t really “get” how his artifacts worked it was lots of charges and such. I sideboarded Oblivion rings but I should have more aggressively switched Aether Adepts for Master Thiefs.

2-1

Round -3 Played against one of my very first opponents – who I played the Illusions 2012 event deck against. He generally plays Red Deck Wins the “GoodStuff” version.

*newb note “Goodstuff” is apparently when you make a deck out of all of the best (and therefore most expensive) cards. The theory and indeed the proof in practice is that even if you aren’t the best player the cards are SO GOOD that most of the time they’ll take you to a win even if you’re not using them in the most advanced manner.

He told me he was “going rouge” this time. He put out a mountain and a Blood Crazed Neonate - I laughed and said it looked like he was playing the same kind of deck he usually played. He was it was just GoodStuff Vampires instead of Red Deck Wins. Did it have Lilliana’s and Bloodkeepers and Oliva’s and some other Planeswalker I don’t remember because I got rid of it quick? Yes it did.

I lost game one, sideboarded in all of the Oblivion Rings ( Because I hate Planeswalkers so much) and the Flashfreezes switching out with 2 mana leaks, the 1shimmering grottos, 1 island and 1 aether adept. I won the second game.

The third game didn’t let me get rid of Lilliana fast enough and couldn’t stop an unblockable vampire because I was pulling counterspells and nothing to remove threats after they resolved

2-1

Round 4 – I don’t remember his name. He was a really good player who was bringing a competitive deck that had been running iffy for him in terms of tempo- it was artifact, planeswalker infect running green.

*Newb Note – between rounds you have to return your deck to it’s original configuration if you sideboarded during the previous round. I asked and was told you couldn’t sideboard before the first round.

I held in for a while but he won with infect even though I had the better board state until the last minute. I brought in oblivions, flashfreezes and master thieves but won the second game because I flipped two delvers in two turns plus managed to get bears and a lord of the unreal out by turn 4

The third game was epic. Really epic, we ran out the clock, I held him at bay I but he was holding on to 6 life with me at 17 we were overtime and clocking down to 2 turns left before the board state slipped just enough for him to proliferate because my Master Theives were awol. A last minute ( literally) combo proliferated two poison counters to 10 winning him the game before I got in for last turn lethal

2-1

Takeaways:

Round 1's error showed I really need to find a way to process the sacrifice and exile requirements in word text blocks better – I’m pretty sure since this is a consistent problem of mine that it’s an LD issue – plus it’s taking me a while to get comfortable with the new timing/layer/sacrifice rules. I got better with it with the white and blue cards but having it on the land card made it kind of a starting point. However the proper amount of sleep seems to have made a difference in how I handled finding out about the mistake. I apologized, informed my fellow newb, and made a note to double check myself if I used the card again that night ( which I did)

Round 2 makes it clear that my dislike of Infect is actually more intesne when I am in a good mood and have had enough sleep because my true offence at the disruption of the design space is clearer to me and ultimately I'm a fan of the game desgin almost more than the game itself. Infect takes a 20 point game and makes it a 10 point game. For very little reason and with very little tech to fix it. He was playing enough control to slow me down all he had to do was outlast me when he had an unblockable infect. He basically won by getting a single poison counter on me and using some kind of combo I still don’t get to proliferate up to 10 in three rounds without using creatures.

The third game of the third round was when I saw what my “multiple instants/effects + tired + rules confusion” looks like from the other side of the table. Even though I was now playing against two of my least favorite mechanics, I wasn’t particularly upset about the mechanics of playing them it was sort of neutrally “unfun” but I was getting to see how the phantasmal images were giving me all sorts of strategic mobility that I didn’t have without them. I was wishing more of my instants had flashback. But my poor opponent was really overwhelmed trying to use multiple instants and effect on me when I responded by casting a response instant that did something for me without changing his board state. He was also under the impression that he wouldn't have to discard a card for Lilliana since I made him exile a different card, I suggested that we call over the judge ( who in our earlier game came over and tried to correct a boardstate that didn't need correcting but did manage to really disrupt both of us as players until we were able to walk it back and explain why I had a -1/-1 counter even though I had hexproof ( it was because he had blocked me using damage the old fashioned way but the phantasmal bears didn't disappear because they were hexproof) but I was pretty OK with everything even if it was the least fun round of the night and felt for him when he came out of the exchange having gained board advantage but still unsure of how.

Round 4’s game I learned a lot and played the hell out of that game. It was high pressure and really intense but not bad, or overwhelming or any of the other things that could have happened. I would have liked to win that game or even drawn, but I’m really proud of my level of play in that game. I think I need to become more familiar with the lower level artifacts in the Scars Block. I’m sure I didn’t play against them properly.

For the first time since I’ve played them I had a Glacial Fortress come in tapped, which was salvaged by the fact that Seachrome Coast was coming in untapped at that point, but I did wonder what if I was pulling seachromes late game – are they really a good choice to run so many multiples?

Pseudo Newb and the Fishy Illusions Rule

Rules questions that came up in casual play on Saturday

If a creature has Islandwalk and an opposing creature has islandwalk can they block each other or is it assumed they are using different paths and they each have substandard intelligence teams while at war?

I have had people count dual producing lands like Seachrome coasts or glacial fortress in X = forests you control. ( or whichever basic land is named) However if you are playing a dual land that is not called or described as a forest or an island and is not triggered by the symbol of the type of mana shouldn’t those producers of mana not count, even though it has a forest symbol on it?

If a card says this.Creature gets flying this turn if you discard a card and there is no manna cost can you discard multiple cards even though the creature already gets powered once? And specifically that would mean that this card has a threshold of 7 cards in a graveyard – if you can you can dump cards from your hand in a single turn on the power of this card to activate it’s own threshold ability?

Thing I learned at Friday Night Magic ( we had to call over a judge).

The trigger to take down an illusion is the act of targeting it – once it becomes a target even manaleaking won’t make it no disappear so if someone doomblades your phantasmal dragon and you hit the doomblade with mana leak in real life it should seem like it resolves on the stack this way

Remembering that the stack resolves top down:

1. Mana leak makes your doomblade cost extra
2. Doomblade doesn’t have enough manna to resolve
3. Doomblade targets illusion
4. Illusion just sits there

What really seems to be happening according to the ruling is this

1. Mana leak targets Doomblade making it cost extra to cast
2. Doomblade doesn’t have enough mana to resolve IF the target is not an illusion do not destroy target
3. Doomblade is cast – mana is tapped and doomblade comes into play targeting illusion ( I don’t understand where the targeting is activating in the stack ) and doesn't resolve
4. Illusion gets sacrficed anyway

From a programming level it looks like even though the spell doesn’t resolve when the spell is cast you have to check on a word search to see if the target has the thext “when (this.card) is targeted then card is sacrificed” and you have to resolve it at the point of being targeted rather than the with the effect being resolved. You additionally have to program a second check because it still isn’t the English version of “targeted” since I asked the judge if this was the stack order and simply targeting a illusion kills it could you use a card that wouldn’t normally affect it but simply by targeting it destroy the illusion – he said no it had to be a legal target so that means the check on the stack looks something like this

1. Illusion is targeted
2. Check if effect/ability can legally target illusion
3. If check = legal then sacrfice illusion
4. Remove from stack
5. Return to stack
6. Effect ability is countered != resolution

There is also no legal target because when it tries to find out whether or not it can resolve the illusion is already sacrificed. So basically it means any legal targeting effect aimed at an illusion = “cannot be countered”.

The only constraint I see is that the mana has to be tapped or the initial ability has to be activated.

Thinking about it, there is still a possible strategic advantage to the mana leak on the doomblade if you want to make sure his mana is tapped out on your turn so you can’t really make the quality “uncounterable” – so I guess it’s going to have to be a subroutine when you mana leak something to keep it from resolving that still lets all the effects of both the original removal and the counter happen.

What this looks like when it isn't an illusion:

For Newbs playing at home when it’s a non illusion creature the stack resolution looks like this:

What it sounds like in real life:

“I’m casting DoomBlade on your Giant Spider for 1 black mana”

“OK, I’m casting Mana Leak on your Doomblade – are you going to pay the extra 3 mana”

“No – I only have two mana left”

“Great”

what it looks like on the stack rememebering that the top of the stack resolves first:

1. Mana leak makes doomblade cost +3 mana ( Doomblade is cast but never resolves anything that damaged the spider is basically “undone” which is the only reason that I can see for the illusion ruling working)
2. Doomblade is cast with 2 mana (theoretically destroying Giant Spider instantly when it resolves so theoretically they Giant Spder is destroyed)
3. Doomblade targets Giant Spider
4. Giant spider just sits there

So the next question I have is if mana leak is predicated on the spell being cast and an additional rule means Doomblade got cast and then mana added for resolution is it the same when a spell is countered like “cancel” or “unsummon”?

Because frankly this is damn close to saying I have a card in my hand and thinking hard about using it makes your illusion go away. It makes me wonder about the mechanic under Cancel – are you really countering the spell or are you erasing the effects of the spell and resetting the board? In a game relying on tempo this is really important.

Or is all of this only important because the word “sacrifice” is on the illusion card so it just forces the player with the illusion to take action regardless of the resolution of the card basically flavor wise “tricking you into suicide”?

I don’t care so much about the illusion being toast but I care a lot about the nature of what’s really happening when you use instants to counter spells – it’s super complicated anyway and the most competitive players can easily bully/intimidate/incorrectly explain newbs like me just by doing the magic equivalent of burying us in paperwork until we agree.

Why this stupid kind of thing might keep women and non- gamers out of Magic, but maybe former jocks and pharmaceutical reps, and mountain climbers should be introduced to the game:

I’m beginning to understand a little bit more of the barriers to entry on magic now.

I played two tournaments with back to back complete losses, I am not under any apprehension of being a good enough player but there is this nagging feeling that even when you understand a rule because it looks simple like “you didn’t really cast that spell because you didn’t have enough mana to pay for it” and then you use what you think is a pretty clear method to protect your board state you find out “OH NO my fine friend – even if you are smart enough to know about stack resolution AND you’re trying to do what everyone has been so helpfully coaching you with and play strategically with removal and instants . . . . SURPRISE there is a super secret special version of the application of this rule that is different and not keyworded and I’m going to use it and keep your mana tapped for being FOOLISH enough to think you understood”

So you’re in the process of losing your 8^th game of the night, you try to defend yourself, because you’re applying things you’ve learned by having your own stuff acted upon and it sounds like you’re being hustled – it FEELS like you’re being hustled and then you also kind of feel like the explanation means you can’t trust anything else you thought you understood.

You call over a judge because you really don’t understand why mana leak works differently just because the card is an illusion and then you really feel like perhaps there is no way you’ll ever be able to play in OP because apparently there’s a cabal of supersecret rules on the stack. You only find out about them if you call over a judge they aren’t close to intuitive and they’re not really good programming.

Now you just feel like a clueless idiot and a “problem child” because you called over a judge got a 10 minute lesson in sketchy object oriented design ( which you are painfully aware the 15 year old judge doesn’t know because he’s still too young to take AP Comp Sci) and you still feel scammed but it’s just legally scammed.

Occupy Magic.

I don’t actually know a lot of girls/women that would want to take a chance of feeling this way “for fun”. I don’t know a lot of guys who would participate in these things without a sense of being able to move forward or get something else out of it. The real problem is these things keep coming up towards the end of the tournament nights where the physical toll also kind of means that tournaments are ending for this newb with almost no accomplishments, being overtired, and inevitably feeling like I know less at the end of the night than I did at the beginning.

I personally really enjoy playing the game, I also think that I am not unusually emotional unless overtired, but I do think that the idea of feeling like a bitch because I needed to really understand a ruling or being hyperaware that the only girl actually playing in the tournament is losing 0-2 for three rounds also makes me feel like I’m feeding into the worst stereotypes. There is some pressure for me at least to look like I CAN learn the came and getting tripped up with something like this makes me wonder if it’s even worth it. Maybe by sucking so bad I'm making it harder for women who CAN play really well to be taken seriously. (Somehow this is something I don't think newb boys and men ever consider. )

In casual play the other problem is disagreements over this stuff bleed over for hours. And they cause friction in other areas because at heart my social circle is all rules lawyers but we all like to define the rules ( that’s in real life – forget the game) so if I’m bringing a rule home I want to have the closest thing possible to a definitive ruling.

Then on the other hand, you get the pretty steady abuse of things like counting green mana producers as forests and you sort of feel like “who’s really teaching me this game anyway” if it weren’t for Planeswalker Points being additive instead of the ELo system they were using I think I would be worried that I was being deliberately misinformed. Everyone has still been very nice, but I still feel like an idiot at the end of a tournament.

And we can now add the idea of a spell having an effect even if it doesn’t resolve to the list of things I think are stupid along with Planeswalkers and Infect.

Unlike Planeswalkers and Infect I would say this kind of thing would be the sort of thing that would have stopped me from playing if I hadn’t already played years ago and knew I liked the game. I just would have felt like it was arbitrary and contradictory and I would never be good enough to keep up with it all and I would have just played with my friends and told myself that I wasn’t smart enough to compete with them ( other people who are less inclined to self blame will say magic is stupid and the other people who play it are losers that have no lives and spend time either thinking this stuff up or learning it to screw people over).

I’m writing this here ( although no one will ever see it ) because I think it’s important to understand that treating it like tennis or figure skating or debate means I know that

• a. I’m a beginner ( but not enough of a beginner to write off this level of rules minutia)
• b. I’m going to have bad outcomes while I’m starting and sometimes the “fun” part won’t be enough to counterbalance the “I suck” part and like any competitive sport you work through them
• c. I want to be able to play at a higher level because it is more fun to sling cards with confidence and use them to the full advantage than it is to just enjoy the flavor.
• d. I have to remember that I’m choosing to do this to compete against myself – but frankly I’m not a “sunny attitude” kind of person so I need to feel like I’ve got some chance of being able to at least play without embarrassing myself and if I hadn’t had the experience of playing before I think I might be one more and done because it’s getting embarrassing

And even knowing all of those things it still made me feel like an idiot and a bitch and stupid for either actually being stupid or for being scammed.

If I feel this way when I really do like the game, the chances are it’s a turn off to people who aren’t treating it as anything other than “enjoyable hobby”.


I want it to be an enjoyable hobby too, I also would like to use it to keep my brain active, fight Alzheimer’s and give me something to reach for that isn’t life or death.

Because honestly almost everything else I do is. Magic shouldn’t make you feel bad. Luckily the next day at the store I played for a couple of hours at my local store with a really wonky but fun deck in casual. That’s where the islandwalk question came from. And the discard question I was playing Coulton’s Creepy Dolls against Gravebound.